The 39-year-old unmarried Chinese man checked himself into a hospital after getting a live, 20-inch Asian swamp eel lodged up his butt.

“The eel was simply trying to find it’s way out,” one person on the medical team explained. “This was a particularly idiotic stunt and could have caused serious injury. Eels have small but very sharp teeth.”

That was October 2013.

Now, a different Chinese man has been checked into another hospital, this time for getting a jumprope stuck inside his penis / urethra.

Earlier this week, the middle-aged man told doctors in a Yichang City, Hubei Province, China emergency room that he inserted the jump rope for “sexual pleasure,” but in the process, the rope knotted and became lodged in his bladder.

The urologist, coincidentally named Dr. Dong, said the rope was 1.1-meters long and 4.4-millimeters thick. An X-ray showed the rope with four knots stuck in the narrowest part of the patient’s urethra with 10 centimetres dangling out of the urethral opening.

Dr. Dong called the man’s masturbatory stunt “ridiculous” because he put his own life at risk.

Of course, we don’t mean to point the finger at only Chinese men here. Reports of people inserting foreign objects into their bodies span the entire globe. Last year, a 70-year-old Australian man got a 10cm fork stuck inside his penis.

A report titled An Unusual Urethral Foreign Body released by the International Journal of Surgery Case Reports notes: “The motives for insertion of a variety of objects are difficult to comprehend.”

The report says needles, pencils, wire, allen keys, toothbrushes, lightbulbs, thermometers, plants, vegetables, leeches, snakes, cocaine and glue are just a few of the objects that have been retrieved from people’s bodies.

“It is apparent that the human mind is uninhibited let alone creative,” the report concludes.